Senator Bong Revilla Files Bill to Control Remittance Companies’ Charges for OFWs Money Transfer Transactions

Senator Ramon Bong Revilla Junior had issued a bill on Wednesday. The bill includes a requirement for remittance companies to disclose the entire fees charged to Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) upon their remittance transactions.




According to Senator Revilla, the bill aims to protect OFWs and Filipinos from the deceiving and unfair charges and actions of remittance companies.

According to Senator Revilla, there had been a total of P235.90 billion remittances from OFWs from the month of April to September from the archives of the Philippine Statistics Authority.

The records of the PSA had shown that roughly 53 percent of Overseas Filipino Workers had remittance transactions in banks. 45 percent of the OFWs had sent their remittances through money transfer service providers. The remaining two percent had sent their remittances through local agencies.




The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) had released a report dated October 15. The report contained the statistics regarding the number of money transferred to the Philippines from OFWs. The report said that the remittances in August of this year had increased by 4.2 percent compared to the remittances made by OFWs in August 2018.

Once the billed passes into law all of the remittance companies will be obligated to follow the standards set by the BSP, SEC, DTI, and the BIR. The services of these remittance agencies will be subjected to strict compliance with the real-time exchange rates specified by the Reference Exchange Rate Bulletin of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, which allows local senders to have flat rate transactions.

The bill also plans to charge penalties to remittance companies for the excessive collection of fees. This subjects the violators with a penalty of imprisonment from 6 to 10 years and a fine of P200,000 to P1,000,000.